The Phils had a strictly unspecified system of attire. What was not encouraged but enforced was for the members to never wear anything that would suggest the Fighting Phils had uniforms. No, that was a thing of the establishment. That was a Waltzer trait. The Fighting Phils were unique! So they wore tattered suits and faded denim and work boots and all matter or blue collar apparel. What unified them all and identified them as a Fighting Phil was the orange. There was a lot of orange. That was the only rule in terms of what the Phils wore. TFP President Eugene Gumble embraced this wholeheartedly. Today and most days he wore a white-button up with orange fabric fastened around the upper-arm region like some sort of a twisted member of a barbershop quartet. But he looked clean, respectable and sane. The appearance of sanity was most misleading.
This isn’t to say that Gumble was insane. No, he was in fact very calculating. He was cunning. He knew exactly why he did the things he did. But nobody else did. That gave him a sense of reckless unpredictability that formed a potent cocktail with his mood-swings and aptness to swinging his hammer. To be fair, any man so insistent on constantly holding a construction hammer in his right hand is bound to make those surrounding him uneasy. This was true of all but the Fighting Phils themselves. They were gleefully subservient to Gumble. They thrilled at obeying his every command. Gruff, bearded and gasoline soaked men yearned for the command of the wiry little Gumble, with his piercing leer and hunched posture. It was an unlikely scenario to be blunt, but it was the unchangeable truth whether others thought Gumble deranged or not. He’d earned his keep at 10. He’d keep it until the day he toppled the regime or the regime toppled him.
What the guards outside were trained to call the foyer of the Fighting Phil Center was actually the gigantic atrium and waiting area of the former Greyhound station that it once was decades ago. But it was sparse and undecorated. All it contained was one circular lunch table piled with papers and pills that Eugene Gumble spent his time at, making the whole atrium some kind of severely out of proportion office in effect. The four men Mayor Charles P. Twarld had clandestinely hired to assassinate Matthew Crawley had hit the right notes with the guards and had been bandied in by the particularly bulky (and incredulous) Terry. They came to discuss that very matter. Lelo and Marcus seemed to know best why they were there. The others just tagged along as they were being conditioned to do, which was all part of the process to Brother Patrick but was starting to nag, ever so slightly, at Klaus. But as would happen when dangling a carrot in front of a rabid badger, perhaps, the encounter with Gumble was anything but smooth.
Gumble took kindly to Marcus for a particular reason. He was unthreatened to see a Brother of the Good Shepard and had seen a million types like Klaus walk into that door looking for work in the past. But Gumble saw himself in Marcus. He saw that the Devil could live behind those eyes if he was invited.
Gumble’s first rise to notoriety with the Phils was when he personally hunted down and poisoned the Waltzer that had killed the mother of the current VP of The Phils. Bob Vister was his name, and he first met Gumble when he awoke to the frothy corpse of the killer of his last parent. It was an unprecedentedly astounding feat. Who had done it? A boy of 10.
Marcus was older than 10 but still had the youthful pluckiness Gumble had once exhibited. He trusted Marcus because of this.
But he did not trust Lelo Vega. Oh, no, he did not. Vega’s inability to answer questions directly exacerbated this intensely.
Gumble was, indeed, a man keen to judge people on the clothes they wear over the company they keep. What was Lelo wearing? A stylish vest? Untattered pants? A well-trimmed goatee? He may as well have worn the ascot the Waltzers wear.
Gumble liked to hit things with his hammer when he was furious, and Vega’s stylishness and churlishness inspired an insipid furor inside of him that engendered a countless number of new holes on the walls and floor at the behest of his hammer’s head. At one point he hammered a circle surrounding him on the floor and told Terry the guard to hold him back.
“I’m crazy, esse!” said Gumble, despite no apparent Spanish roots. “I’ll go loco.”
At one point he even threw his hammer at Vega to stun or injure him, but it was a severe misfire. The hammer hit the floor and skid to the wall.
Well, now he was just angry at all of them. He disliked the superiority they asserted. They assumed they could just come in here and poach some Fighting Phils for themselves to do the job Gumble lived and breathed and would die for? Oh no, not in his house.
How had he earned his keep? He killed a Waltzer. What was his token of entry? A corpse. A Waltzer corpse. If these johnny-come-latelys wanted a ticket in, they’d be expected to provide the same Gumble had provided.
The Phils had a strictly unspecified system of attire. What was not encouraged but enforced was for the members to never wear anything that would suggest the Fighting Phils had uniforms. No, that was a thing of the establishment. That was a Waltzer trait. The Fighting Phils were unique! So they wore tattered suits and faded denim and work boots and all matter or blue collar apparel. What unified them all and identified them as a Fighting Phil was the orange. There was a lot of orange. That was the only rule in terms of what the Phils wore. TFP President Eugene Gumble embraced this wholeheartedly. Today and most days he wore a white-button up with orange fabric fastened around the upper-arm region like some sort of a twisted member of a barbershop quartet. But he looked clean, respectable and sane. The appearance of sanity was most misleading.
This isn’t to say that Gumble was insane. No, he was in fact very calculating. He was cunning. He knew exactly why he did the things he did. But nobody else did. That gave him a sense of reckless unpredictability that formed a potent cocktail with his mood-swings and aptness to swinging his hammer. To be fair, any man so insistent on constantly holding a construction hammer in his right hand is bound to make those surrounding him uneasy. This was true of all but the Fighting Phils themselves. They were gleefully subservient to Gumble. They thrilled at obeying his every command. Gruff, bearded and gasoline soaked men yearned for the command of the wiry little Gumble, with his piercing leer and hunched posture. It was an unlikely scenario to be blunt, but it was the unchangeable truth whether others thought Gumble deranged or not. He’d earned his keep at 10. He’d keep it until the day he toppled the regime or the regime toppled him.
What the guards outside were trained to call the foyer of the Fighting Phil Center was actually the gigantic atrium and waiting area of the former Greyhound station that it once was decades ago. But it was sparse and undecorated. All it contained was one circular lunch table piled with papers and pills that Eugene Gumble spent his time at, making the whole atrium some kind of severely out of proportion office in effect. The four men Mayor Charles P. Twarld had clandestinely hired to assassinate Matthew Crawley had hit the right notes with the guards and had been bandied in by the particularly bulky (and incredulous) Terry. They came to discuss that very matter. Lelo and Marcus seemed to know best why they were there. The others just tagged along as they were being conditioned to do, which was all part of the process to Brother Patrick but was starting to nag, ever so slightly, at Klaus. But as would happen when dangling a carrot in front of a rabid badger, perhaps, the encounter with Gumble was anything but smooth.
Gumble took kindly to Marcus for a particular reason. He was unthreatened to see a Brother of the Good Shepard and had seen a million types like Klaus walk into that door looking for work in the past. But Gumble saw himself in Marcus. He saw that the Devil could live behind those eyes if he was invited.
Gumble’s first rise to notoriety with the Phils was when he personally hunted down and poisoned the Waltzer that had killed the mother of the current VP of The Phils. Bob Vister was his name, and he first met Gumble when he awoke to the frothy corpse of the killer of his last parent. It was an unprecedentedly astounding feat. Who had done it? A boy of 10.
Marcus was older than 10 but still had the youthful pluckiness Gumble had once exhibited. He trusted Marcus because of this.
But he did not trust Lelo Vega. Oh, no, he did not. Vega’s inability to answer questions directly exacerbated this intensely.
Gumble was, indeed, a man keen to judge people on the clothes they wear over the company they keep. What was Lelo wearing? A stylish vest? Untattered pants? A well-trimmed goatee? He may as well have worn the ascot the Waltzers wear.
Gumble liked to hit things with his hammer when he was furious, and Vega’s stylishness and churlishness inspired an insipid furor inside of him that engendered a countless number of new holes on the walls and floor at the behest of his hammer’s head. At one point he hammered a circle surrounding him on the floor and told Terry the guard to hold him back.
“I’m crazy, esse!” said Gumble, despite no apparent Spanish roots. “I’ll go loco.”
At one point he even threw his hammer at Vega to stun or injure him, but it was a severe misfire. The hammer hit the floor and skid to the wall.
Well, now he was just angry at all of them. He disliked the superiority they asserted. They assumed they could just come in here and poach some Fighting Phils for themselves to do the job Gumble lived and breathed and would die for? Oh no, not in his house.
How had he earned his keep? He killed a Waltzer. What was his token of entry? A corpse. A Waltzer corpse. If these johnny-come-latelys wanted a ticket in, they’d be expected to provide the same Gumble had provided.